Sublime

was a dead British orator and writer who was on my mind. Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them.

Those who shape the manners and mores are the true legislators of mankind—they wield the greatest power and influence.

connecting the notion of rights with that of personal interest, which is the only immutable point in the human heart, what means will you have of governing the world except by fear? When I am told that, since the laws are weak and the populace is wild, since passions are excited and the authority of virtue is paralyzed, no measures must be taken to

Robert Caro has written that “power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals.”

all evil needs to prevail is for good men to do nothing.

Cicero called the only “real philosophers”—the ancient Stoics—even

Nothing has more alienated many magnanimous minds from Imperial enterprises than the fact that they are always exhibited as stealthy or sudden defenses against a world of cold rapacity and fear.